While Washington debates how to help the country’s struggling small businesses, states and municipalities have stepped up with an array of initiatives to stanch closings and save jobs. The New York Times explains.

President Obama’s new health-care push would apply the 2.9 percent health-care payroll tax to investments. We’ve never done this before. If we do, with the Bush tax cuts set to expire, the tax rate on capital gains and dividends could jack up over 50 percent.

The pound's fall is nearly over but foreign exchange markets are still going to watch developments, since parity with the euro can not be ruled out as the country gets closer to a crucial spring election, analysts and traders told CNBC.com Tuesday.

Given the current trouble Congress is experiencing getting a financial regulatory bill out of the Senate, this underscores some of the confusion about arcane financial products and confusion over how to address their risks (if any) towards the financial markets.

In talking with global investors and in my recent trip to Davos for the World Economic Forum, I found that people are hardly even talking about Russia anymore. They’ve dropped the ”R“ to the point where it’s become the BIC nations.

The Federal Reserve will keep interest rates low until a stronger recover is underway, but the Fed is still bracing itself to pull easy money from the market, said Charlie Evans, the Chicago Federal Reserve President.

In the movie, the Wizard of Oz was a powerful being purported to have the knowledge to get Dorothy back to her home in Kansas with Auntie Em. The Wizard used a smoke and mirror routine to make his powers appear larger than they truly were. The Wizard at heart was no more than a tinkerer who didn’t know the outcome of his own experimentation.

Clearly Ben worries that we are a ways from shaking off the effects of the financial meltdown. In his testimony he said he would need to see a rebound in employment, housing, and bank lending before he would feel a sustained recovery is at hand. That is pretty clear as to what has to be obvious before rates come down.

Fed Chairman Bernanke again committed to keeping interest rates "exceptionally low for an extended period" to support a "nascent" economic recovery. At the same time, Bernanke seemed to infer that he did not believe the economy was yet growing on a self-sustaining basis.

One unintended consequence of delaying the hearing was that Bernanke was denied the opportunity to further signal his plans to begin to normalize the spread between the target federal funds rate and the discount rate. The Fed's announcement a week later that it would raise the discount rate last surprised some market participants.

The economies in the West are not actually recovering, Martin Hennecke, associate director at Tyche, told CNBC. He foresees high or even hyper inflation in the West and a potential crisis in the bonds market.

Simpson said, "A lot of blood hair and eyeballs have to lay on the floor before we finish. There's going to be anguishing. This is a suicide mission". It will come from all sides, the left and the right.